Privileged Access Management: A Remedy for Data Security

Dec 24, 2018 | Digital Identities, Insider Threats

There was a recent data breach incident in one of the global E-commerce giants. Immediately after the news turned epidemic, the management dished out the queries and criticism and claimed that they have fixed the issue in no time. They even informed the customers who are possibly affected by the ‘breach’ incident. However, it is undeniable that they have tarnished their goodwill a bit after this incident and a huge section of customers got worrisome. This incident has brought forward the most burning issue to the forefront: “Are we digitally secure?”

The spike in data breach incident in the recent past including that of a renowned online discussion forum has forced us to think of a smarter and more sophisticated way to manage our digital identities. Almost 100 million users’ data were compromised because of unauthorized access done by a malicious third party. Detailed account information such as name, email address, encrypted password and even financial data imported from linked networks were compromised. The organization claimed that they logged out of all their users who they thought might have been affected. Nevertheless, the question still whirlwinds our mind, “Are we digitally secure?”

The digital revolution has engulfed the world in such a way that we can’t even think of ourselves away from our digital world for a single day. But that increases cyber vulnerabilities. Our digital identities, personal data, financial data, applications are all vulnerable to cyber crooks. In this backdrop, risk management teams, compliance officers, CISOs from every industry are forced to increase their security budget to assure data security. Many surveys show that insider threats, data breach threats, social engineering, zero-day attacks remain the topmost security concerns. The major problem lies with the organizations who are not paying enough attention to privileged access management.

Data breach incidents are rising and that has to do with inadequate security measures related to privileged access. In order to make digital identities and our crucial data secure, it is imperative to have robust data security mechanisms in place where every access to critical information is authenticated, controlled and monitored. Privileged Access Management allows to safeguard digital assets, mitigates internal, third party and malicious actors’ threats. Every access to the critical system is authenticated, monitored and documented. Privileged Access Management is a practice which mitigates threat of malicious threats, breach of confidential information. It offers your security team one centralized policy engine enabling rule-based access for every user. In addition, it helps you to meet regulatory compliance framework, which ensures every data protection, as mandated by GDPR, SWIFT, PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 200701 etc.

A robust Privileged Access Management solution ensures data security by monitoring every activity done by the privileged users. With this, the suspicious users are refrained from doing any virtual and financial damage to the enterprise data and goodwill eventually.